It didn't take long for me to realize that my assumption about how to deal with the cold was very wrong. While the interior of the Arrow was nice and warm, anyone stuck driving the C-PHs around quickly got cold enough that it was a genuine medical concern. Even with rotating out every fifteen minutes of patrolling and sitting around, we were quickly getting way too cold to function properly.
I could heal away frostbite, but that didn't mean any of us wanted to actually get it.
I made a quick call to Rabben with my comm, and when he stopped laughing at me for taking that long to realize it was a genuine issue, he agreed to round up some clean winter wear in exchange for three of the spare blaster rifles we had stashed in the Arrow. Thirty minutes and a quick exchange later, and we were all wrapped up in cold-rated jackets and pants, with gloves and face masks.
"Thank you, we don't have much experience with planets this cold," I explained to the Besalisk, trying my best to make it sound like a simple oversight rather than a symptom of inexperience.
"'s hardly a fair trade, couple bits of clothes for three blasters," Rabben admitted with a shrug. "Dilip was happy to turn a profit in the trade."
When the large humanoid left to return to his work, I turned back to my ground team, watching as they finished bundling up. Nal was leaving most of it off as he was piloting Arrow, but Julus and Tatnia eagerly strapped on every extra layer.
"Alright, we can stretch out the rotation a bit more, but let's see how efficient this gear is before setting a time.…" I said, trailing off slightly with a wince. "So we are going to be flying around, on patrol for several more hours… I would like to try and learn some new magic, but I can't do that while on a C-PH…."
Nal chuckled as he realized I was basically asking to hog the gunner seat of the Arrow while everyone else flew around, Tatnia and Julus catching on shortly after.
"It's fine, Boss, this gear feels warm, and we can rotate out the pilot," Tatnia assured me. "Every bit you learn makes our team more powerful, so it's worth the cold and time."
Nal and Julus agreed that it was fine, so the blue-skinned Duros and myself climbed into the Arrow. I took the back seat, the one that had a fold-down screen and a control system for the roof turret. I quickly collapsed and moved the turret controls out of the way, allowing me to summon my grimoire. I took a few minutes to familiarize myself with my options before flipping to the segment about the fire rune spell and beginning to study.
The first day of patrolling and waiting passed slowly but steadily. I managed to learn fire rune pretty easily, happily adding it to my repertoire by the end of the day. We ended up testing it outside of town as we investigated the crashed speeder the team had stumbled on while I was talking to Besalisk. The explosion it caused was decent, though I had a feeling it looked more potent than it actually was due to the fireball it spat out. There was no doubt it would take out people in even a medium level of armor, but it wasn't taking down air speeders anytime soon… Probably.
Patrols continued on into the next day, and I flew around on one of the C-PHs, practicing my magic since I could do that on the back of a moving speeder. I spent the first half of the day casting each spell before canceling it, repeating that dozens and dozens of times. The second half of the day, while flying around on patrol, I dedicated completely to mastering the clairvoyance spell as soon as possible, trying my best to push it to the limit. The sooner I could use it to locate stuff I had never seen in person, the better.
To practice the spell, I started with the easy stuff, scanning for odds and ends I knew were on the Talos Chariot. It was a warm-up, something to let me really get a feel for how the spell felt and worked. Eventually, when I was satisfied I had mastered the basic levels of the spell, I started pushing it further by searching for some of the ingots we used to buy Nevue. While doing that didn't take more energy or change the nature of the spell, I could feel it reaching further, latching on to the astronomically distant credit ingot.
As I practiced, I could feel myself getting better and better with the spell, the aetheric linking that let the spell connect to distant objects, people, and locations getting more and more manageable. My ultimate test, the confirmation that I had successfully mastered the spell, was trying to get the spell's arrow to point to Cloud City, a place that I chose at random because I had obviously never been there but had seen a half dozen times in the movies.
I was getting closer, but by the end of the day, I still hadn't managed to link to something I had never seen personally. I was pretty sure my seemingly natural ineptitude with illusion magic was holding me back, despite the fact that I knew the matrix by heart and had it firmly ingrained into my aetheric field.
On the third day of flying around on patrols, killing time waiting for the raiders to show up on the Talos Chariot's sensors, I was back in the back of the Arrow, my grimoire opened to the muffle spell. So far, we hadn't really been using stealth, at least not to the point where the ability to silence yourself was useful, but I knew at some point it could come in handy, so I wanted to at least know it.
In total, the new spell took me just under nine hours to learn, my issue with illusion magic once again rearing its head. By the end of it, I was just glad that there were very few spells I desperately wanted from the illusion branch of magic.
Between practicing and learning magic, patrolling, and keeping an eye out for people sneaking around the outskirts of the mining town, I also had plenty of time to observe the town itself. It was clear to see that the stress of the constant threat of raids was grinding on its citizens. I saw three fights between citizens, one of which I almost stepped in to break up when Rabben arrived to do so.
It didn't help that there were a surprising amount of people crammed into the relatively small town, enough that I was confused about where they were all staying. When I wondered that question out loud, Nal pointed out that there were probably apartments underground to help lower heating costs. It certainly explained why some of the prefab-looking buildings seemed to house multiple families while not being all that much bigger than the ferrocrete buildings that made up the majority of the town's structures.
We were about halfway through the fourth day when Calima called me out of the blue, cutting me off during a conversation with Tatnia.
"Say again, Calima?" I asked after pulling my comm out.
"Sensors are… picking up energy signatures coming towards the town," She repeated. "We are orienting to descend from behind them to keep them from running away. Racer has already calculated a possible general area where their camp might be."
"How long do we have?"
"... forty-five minutes at… their current speed," Calima responded. "From the west."
"Alright, get into position, I want you to hit them just before they get to the town," I explained.
"Understood… Good luck."
I quickly called Rabben to warn him, and within fifteen minutes, the entire town had disappeared into whatever buildings the people called home. It was actually kind of eerie, watching a whole town disappear, with hardly any shouting or panic, save a few startled kids.
If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.
As I looked around, I could see a dozen or so people making their way to the roofs of some of the taller structures, taking cover as best they could, including Rabben himself. They were armed and ready, clearly prepared to defend the town as best they could if we failed. My team got ready just as quickly, with Nal and I on the C-PH's while Julus piloted the Arrow and Tatnia manned its turret. We swung around the town and slowed by the west-facing section, ready to intercept any of the raiders if they managed to get through the coming ambush.
After about thirty-five minutes, Nal spotted and pointed them out. The large group was visible in the distance, more than twenty speeders, all making a beeline toward us and the town. I raised our electrobinoculars, focusing on them easily as the advanced compensated for their movement.
They were a rag-tag group dressed in winter clothes of various colors and designs, some newer, while others were ragged and torn, their faces covered with black face masks and goggles. Their speeders were all painted white, but that didn't stop me from immediately recognizing the classic 74-Z design. On top of that, most of the raiders had blaster weapons slung across their chest, ready to access but out of the way enough to drive. As far as I could tell, like their bikes, all of them were armed with the same thing.
"Two minutes out… starting rapid descent…" Calima said, my comm now set loud enough to hear from my pocket.
I knew that ships meant for space travel were fast, in the same way that I knew the 747s that seemed to go so slowly in the distance were actually traveling extremely fast. However, it's one thing to know that and another to see a seventy-three-meter-long spaceship drop from the high atmosphere to about a hundred and fifty meters off the ground, almost on top of the large biker swarm.
It was incredible to watch as the Talos Chariot moved fast enough that by the time it was on the raiders, slowing down to match their speed, they had barely had enough time to react to it at all. And now that it was there, they weren't getting away.
Immediately the quad laser turret on the bottom of the vessel deployed, swiveling around and unloading a deluge of red energy bolts. It was similar to the weapon mounted to the Millenium Falcon and was designed to take down shielded starfighters, which meant it was very overqualified for this use.
The blasts of energy eviscerated the first three speeders instantly, the vehicles detonating in explosions that knocked out another raider. Near misses were lethal as well, each blast exploding violently and hurling rocks and chunks of frozen dirt like frag mines going off. The Chariots tail mounted heavy cannon, the newest addition to the ship's direct armament, swiveled around as well, firing deadly beams of energy down at the back row of speeders, killing two more and causing another to tumble off their bike, most likely dying when they hit the ground.
To their credit, the raiders reacted a lot smoother than any raider gang had any right to. Instead of the chaos and mayhem that I had been expecting, the remaining bikes peeled off into three groups, smoothly reorienting to avoid more fire. They spread out as well, making it much more difficult to take out multiple targets at once. If our only ace in the hole had been the ship, we would have been in trouble, as it wouldn't have been able to stop all three groups at once. Instead, two gray streaks burst out of the Chariot's starboard hangar as the fruits of Miru's labor were deployed.
Our brilliant engineer had had three days to herself, waiting for the raiders to take the bait, and she had not been idle. Between her own programming skills and Racers, she had torn down the loyalty sections of the droid tri-fighters and slaved their command code to her own commands. Their controls were a little clunky, something Miru was confident she could fix, but painting seven fleeing speeder bikes as targets for an airstrike was pretty straightforward.
The tri fighters tore after the second largest group, flying far faster than the Chariot and swerving at angles that would have torn the much larger vessel to pieces. Their advanced targeting systems and a mix of laser weapons erased their targets in a matter of seconds, leaving trails of blue thruster energy as they flew a patrol circuit around the town.
Meanwhile, Miru, who was manning the C-ROC's tail cannon, and Calima wiped out the largest group almost as fast, the only delay caused by trying to match the speeder bikes maneuverability with their heavy weapons.
That just left the smallest group, four speeder bikes that, at first, had stayed straight, heading directly for us and the town. Funnily enough, after seeing their compatriots die with very little effort, they seemed much less eager to attack the town, especially when they got close enough to see us waiting for them. The remaining four speeders slowed and turned before burning away, back the way they came, as fast as they could.
"Our turn!" I said before gunning my own speeder bike.
Nal easily kept up with me, our extremely fast bikes whipping away from the Arrow and chasing after the fleeing raiders. According to Miru, the Empire apparently designed C-PH to be the fastest speeder bike available. Miru had attempted to explain to me how it managed to hold that title, but it had gone over my head. Now though, as we whipped past rocks, snow mounds, and the charred, slagged remains of raider bikes and the drivers, I at least understood what it meant.
The C-PH was fucking FAST.
Until now, even when I was practicing before, I had yet to open one up and go, but boy did it have a whole lot of get up and fucking go. Both Nal and I held on tightly as we chased after the raiders, quickly catching up to them, my bike letting out a long beep, letting me know whoever I was chasing just came into weapons targeting range.
I clamped down my finger on the fire control, the forward-facing cannon dumping a barrage of red energy, chasing after the still-running speeder bikes. The self-adjusting targeting system tried to lock on and direct my fire, but between my own movement and the raider's surprisingly skilled and effective juking, I couldn't land a shot.
Nal, on the other hand, seemed to know something I didn't, or at least could compensate for the movement well enough to rake his blaster fire across the closest bike, the back end exploding in sparks and fire, the driver tumbling off and vanishing, turning a long streak of the icy, broken stone ground red.
We continued to chase after them, easily keeping up with them for another few minutes, managing to take out a second speeder and rider before I made a gesture to Nal, both of us slowing significantly, turning back as if we were heading back to town. We flew for about fifteen seconds before stopping, waiting for the Arrow to catch up.
"Was that sufficient?" Nal asked as we came to a stop.
I raised my hand and, for a moment, focused on one of the two raiders who had "Escaped" before casting the arrow version of clairvoyance. My hand glowed for a second before the familiar pale white arrow appeared, wobbling slightly as it pointed back toward the raiders.
"Yup!" I said. "We got them!"